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Tapes Spy Chief Left Behind Scandalize Peru

They were the most closely guarded secrets of President Alberto K. Fujimori's rule, thousands of videotapes documenting the corruption and sexual high jinks of Peru's most powerful people that his spy chief used to blackmail and control virtually the entire political establishment.

Now, as Congress and an investigating judge release the tapes day by day, they have become a national obsession, shaking the elite to its core, stunning a mesmerized public and feeding a deep popular suspicion and cynicism.

The tapes testify to corruption and dissolution reaching to the highest levels of the army, Legislature, Supreme Court, business community and news media. Virtually no quarter of power has been left unsinged.

Several of the leading candidates in the April 8 election to replace Mr. Fujimori, who resigned in November, have already been damaged by the tapes, which promise to define the political landscape for at least months to come and perhaps permanently transform how politics are conducted in this Andean country, which has been an important regional ally of the United States.

The tapes were secretly recorded by Vladimiro Montesinos, Mr. Fujimori's spy chief and a close associate of the Central Intelligence Agency through most of the 1990's, who is now a fugitive from justice. They show Mr. Montesinos and his aides handing out money and giving directions to a wide array of officials.

''The impact has been sweeping,'' José Ugaz, the state attorney who is leading the government's investigation into the former spy chief's activities, said in an interview. ''The presidential candidates complain that the release of the tapes is being manipulated. The public shows no interest in hearing about government programs but only demands more videos, and the videos we have already seen have changed the political scene.''

Government officials say there is also evidence that Mr. Montesinos and his henchmen continue to pull strings behind the scenes, spreading disinformation in an attempt to destabilize the government, affect the political campaign and derail the government's investigation.

The videotapes released so far show Mr. Montesinos and his associates manipulating everything from government arms purchases, to the concession of mining contracts to foreign companies, to the granting of private bank loans to political allies, to the fixing of the electoral apparatus to allow Mr. Fujimori to win a tainted re-election victory last May.

About 2,400 tapes were captured late last year from Mr. Montesinos's offices and a Lima apartment as he and Mr. Fujimori were forced to resign and take flight under a cloud of scandal. Mr. Fujimori remains in exile in Japan, while Mr. Montesinos's whereabouts have remained a mystery since he reportedly underwent plastic surgery in Venezuela in December.

''The videos show that Montesinos had absolute control over the public institutions of this country,'' Mr. Ugaz said. ''And he taped absolutely everything.'' By Mr. Ugaz's count, the tapes have already helped lead to the arrests of eight active and retired generals, one Fujimori cabinet minister, two senior government prosecutors and one mayor.

Four of the Supreme Court's 25 members are under investigation, three of whom were suspended from their judicial duties this week, accused of links to Mr. Montesinos. One congressman has been arrested, another has fled to Miami, and five more are under investigation.

Mr. Ugaz said only 10 percent of the 700 most sensitive videos captured had been reviewed by judges so far because the former spy chief had them electronically scrambled, forcing a time-consuming process by which technicians reprogram the tapes to retrieve a grainy black and white picture and muffled audio.

Mr. Ugaz said he expected many more officials ''at the highest level'' to be revealed taking bribes once all the videos are seen in the coming weeks. Law enforcement officials are seeking hundreds, if not thousands more videos that are believed to be hidden around Peru or spirited out of the country.

Alejandro Toledo, who ran a lively campaign against Mr. Fujimori last year and is the front-runner in the current political contest, said last year that a Montesinos videotape existed showing him drugged and in a compromising position with women other than his wife. Mr. Toledo has said he was kidnapped by government intelligence agents at the time of the taping.

The tape has yet to surface, but others reportedly exist showing prominent people patronizing a bordello and using illegal drugs.

''There may be all sorts of bombs in the tapes,'' said Enrique Zileri, director of Caretas, the country's leading political magazine. ''The only candidate who is not nervous is Alan Garciá, because he was not here for nine years,'' he added, referring to the former president who lived in exile during most of the Fujimori years.

Dirty tricks are still part of Peruvian politics, and many say Mr. Montesinos and his associates are behind them in an effort to weaken the interim government and prevent anti-corruption hard-liners from winning the presidential and congressional elections. ''I'm convinced Montesinos is still a force in the country and his organization -- containing hundreds of people -- is still pressuring the Congress, the judiciary and the police,'' Mr. Ugaz said. ''To clean this up will take a long time.''

Last weekend, one major television network long tied to Mr. Montesinos broadcast unsubstantiated reports alleging that interim President Valentín Paniagua had taken a $30,000 campaign contribution from an associate of Mr. Montesinos.

Mr. Paniagua immediately went on television to deny the charge, and the network suspended its news gathering activities after several journalists resigned in protest.

Rumors this week that several major banks are about to go bankrupt, Economy Minister Javier Silva Ruete said, ''can only have its origin in a mafia well known to us.''

A video that showed Mr. Montesinos meeting with three Supreme Court justices has disappeared -- proof, some Peruvians say, that Mr. Montesinos's tentacles reach deep into the government investigation. The missing tape showed Mr. Montesinos offering one of the justices, Alipio Montes de Oca, who headed the national elections commission during last year's balloting, a $10,000-a-month stipend.

According to a summary transcript released by a criminal court judge before the tape was lost, Mr. Montes de Oca was heard to say that he would consider the offer, at which point the former spy chief replied, ''You have nothing to think about.''

Mr. Montes de Oca said he had never received the money, but the Supreme Court has suspended him.

Congress last month temporarily disbanded a legislative committee investigating the origins of some $80 million that Mr. Montesinos held in foreign bank accounts, now frozen, after one of its members was seen on a tape receiving a $4,000 campaign contribution from the brother of an arms dealer close to Mr. Montesinos.

That videotape was particularly shocking to Peruvians because it apparently showed that the congressman, Ernesto Gamarra -- long one of Mr. Montesinos's most strident public critics -- was in the pay of the spymaster to limit any investigations into his spy network.

Congressman Fernando Olivera, a leading presidential candidate and close ally of Mr. Gamarra, has been hard hit by the disclosure, even though it was his party that revealed the first damaging Montesinos video last September -- showing the spy chief giving a bribe to an opposition legislator -- that sparked the unraveling of the Fujimori government.

Mr. Gamarra has denied any wrongdoing, but he has been thrown out of his party. And an opinion poll released on Thursday found that Mr. Olivera's support in Lima and the nearby port of Callao had dropped him from second place with 17 percent to fourth place with 10.9 percent.

Other tapes suggest that Mr. Montesinos's web of corruption reached deep into the private sector.

In one tape he is seen meeting with the director of Banco Wiese Sudameris, Peru's second-largest bank, to ask that debts for media companies friendly to the Fujimori government be refinanced. In another, Mr. Montesinos pressed Justice Jaime Beltrán of the Supreme Court to rule in favor of the Newmont Mining Corporation, based in Denver, in its bid to buy an additional 25 percent share of the country's largest gold mine from a French state-owned company that preferred to sell to an Australian concern.

Mr. Montesinos argued that if the court favored the American company, it would help clinch Washington's support for Peru's search for a peace settlement with Ecuador over a border dispute. The Supreme Court's 1998 decision in favor of Newmont outraged the French government.

The investigations of Mr. Montesinos have so far painted a picture of a reckless man with an unappeasable craving for money and power, with almost unlimited influence and a taste for diamond-crusted watches and beach-side mansions.

Mr. Montesinos and his associates, investigators said, sold apartment buildings and hotels to Peruvian pension funds at highly inflated prices and directed the purchases of defective Soviet-era MIG fighters.

Peruvian investigators are looking into evidence that he might have been involved with gunrunning to Marxist guerrillas in Colombia.

His wife, Trinidad Becerra, has been put under house arrest, his daughter Silvana, 25, has been detained, and other close relatives have gone into hiding. Several of the relatives had multimillion-dollar foreign bank accounts in their names.

The tapes and investigations have dominated the radio talk shows and increased the ratings of the television news programs. ''The commotion will not end,'' Mr. Ugaz, the investigating judge, said, ''until every video is seen.''

But ordinary Peruvians seem less certain that all of the tapes will indeed be aired publicly, and the tapes seen so far have created widespread cynicism among Peruvians about their institutions. ''These tapes show you can't trust a single politician,'' said Manuel Aguilar Crevoisier, 54, a fireman in Callao. ''You watch: they are not going to show all the tapes. There are too many powerful interests involved.''

In Lima, Juana Hinojosa, 40, a street vendor who sells boiled eggs, potatoes and corn on the cob, was similarly distrustful. ''These videos give me great pain,'' she said. ''All the politicians are the same. They want nothing but money while we poor people fall farther and farther behind.''